AD&D: A Useful Cliche

One of the features of my Dungeons & Dragons campaign is that there is a major dungeon conveniently located directly beneath the main city. This is, of course, a well-worn cliche – see Waterdeep and Undermountain, for instance, and the dungeons underneath Blackmoor and Castle Greyhawk respectively were within a convenient distance of a nearby town.

However, as I recently discovered it’s a cliche which can help out a lot. Two players couldn’t make it to our most recent session, but as Dan pointed out there are advantages to pushing on and playing anyway under such circumstances – most notably, it means people don’t feel obliged to turn up to any session. (That sounds like a bad thing until you realise that making a game feel like an obligation is the first step to it feeling like a chore – plus if you do feel that obligation, missing a session feels like a disaster and so when you inevitably do miss a session you can end up feeling less invested in the game as a result.)

That said, I’m not usually up as a GM for having absent players’ characters present in a session, even as mute cardboard cutouts who stand at the back, for several reasons:

I don’t like the split in IC/OOC knowledge it makes; it’s enough of a job holding back stuff you know OOC but not IC, but if you end up knowing stuff IC you didn’t actually experience OOC that is just a headache.

I’d feel bad as a GM if something happened in such a session and a player was like “oh, man, my character would have had a major response to that, it’s a shame I wasn’t there” – for the same reason I dislike it when that happens when I was a player. (Worst case ever: coming back after a break of a few sessions where I couldn’t make it to discover that my character now had a magical hand due to various stuff he did under the GM’s control.) Better to have them saying “It’s a shame my character missed that” than “It’s a shame that my character was there but didn’t react in the way I would have wanted to because I wasn’t there”.

I just don’t like risking people’s PCs in their absence, but I don’t want to give them mysterious temporary plot immunity, so keeping them offstage is easier.

This policy meant that the party was two characters down, which meant that the party’s skills set and numbers were at a point where exploring the main dungeon would have been very unwise. So, I put an offer on the table: either we postpone, or I run a brief one-session side quest for the remaining players based around one of their characters’ interests. (As it happened, I was able to weave in links between the side quest and the party’s main investigation, so that helps.)

Here’s where having the dungeon conveniently close to a major population centre: cities are excellent sources of side quests and adventure hooks. You can have pretty much any sort of institution there and it’s expected that there’ll always be something to do. Small rural hamlets are expected to have quiet days where there just isn’t much going on of note, but cities never sleep, it’s kind of a celebrated feature of theirs. Having one of the city’s institutions send an urgent request to the PCs is a side quest possibility that will never get old thanks to the sheer number of institutions that could possibly exist in a city. In addition, the large marketplaces mean that players can believably kit up for a side adventure before heading out.

As fun as your Village of Hommlet may be, sooner or later it’s got to either dry up as an adventure source or start feeling unusually and especially unlucky when it comes to crises which farmers are willing to pay gold to solve. Not so your city! I begin to suspect that Gygax’s placing of the City of Greyhawk right next to his megadungeon was no mere exercise in Fritz Leiber appreciation (though that would be reasonable enough in itself), and was more than a mere concession to IC convenience when it came to travel time and finding somewhere to spend all those copper pieces dredged up from the depths: it was actually a conscious and deliberate placement of one bustling and inexhaustible adventure location next to another.

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3 thoughts on “AD&D: A Useful Cliche”

I always find it preferable to excuse a character out of the session whenever possible but have actually found it easier in my World of Darkness game, which is more modular, than my Pathfinder game. Sometimes there really is no easy way out barring … “Oh, he simply chose to have a sit down in the dungeon over there but will randomly catch up when the player arrives.” *le sigh* Still, any option (even the surreal ones) are better than having a massive change happen to the player character during the break. Ick!

I kind of see that as a good argument for the “raid” model of sessions – where the PCs should aim to get out of the dungeon by the end of the session, so each session covers a single foray into and out of the dungeon. (I belief this is the thinking behind the Escape the Dungeon!house rules.) I’m supportive of it for other reasons too – for instance, I don’t think allowing resting in the dungeon itself makes a blind bit of sense unless the players have established a defensible fortification of some sort in there, or made friends with dungeon denizens who have.

Dungeon resting is one of those things that usually really damage suspension of disbelief. The worst offenders for me are those where not only are you infiltrating a castle full of enemies, but also supposedly on an urgent quest (usually with a non-specific deadline) like stopping a ritual, catching a fugitive or preventing the execution of prisoners. Keep on the Shadowfell was notable for that, being so big that you realistically couldn’t get through without resting several times, which of course is built into 4E. But it really doesn’t contribute to the sense of urgency.

I think there are some times when you can pull it off, especially where there’s no reason to think there are *active* dangers in a dungeon. In fact the Arcol dungeon right now is a pretty good example, as we’re fairly confident that these unsealed sections are a matter of traps and mysteries rather than anything likely to eat us in the night (though of course we don’t need to sleep there when we live upstairs). And there are a few models of überdungeon where it’s really more like a wilderness containing several dungeons, and you can rest in the less dungeony areas. But on the whole I agree.